Do strong negative emotions like shame, anger or worry tilt
you back toward drinking or drugs?

Do you use getting drunk or high as a tool to change your
mood so you won’t have to deal with these types of feelings?

If so, consider improving your ‘distress tolerance’ skills -
because with just a little practice you should notice a real improvement in
your ability to handle uncomfortable feelings, without needing to get drunk or
high.

Consider the definition of Distress Intolerance = You are unable to fully and calmly
accept and experience negative or uncomfortable emotions and when these types
of emotions arise you feel a strong need to escape them.1

If that definition hits close to home, here are three good
reasons why you might want to take action to improve your distress tolerance
skills:

1. As you are more able to experience negative emotions without
feeling overwhelmed and without feeling as if you need to escape you’ll have
less need to use alcohol or drugs to numb your feelings.

2. Trying to get away from experiencing negative emotions doesn’t
work very well, in fact, it usually makes things worse. If you skip an
after-work gathering because of nervousness you’ll probably feel even more
nervous the next time you’re faced with a similar situation – if you use
alcohol to reduce the shame you feel about losing your job you’ll probably feel
even more shameful the next day…

3. Negative emotions are normal and healthy and if you try to
block all negative emotions you end up missing a lot of the richness and
texture of the human experience. How can you truly appreciate what you have
when you don’t allow yourself to feel sadness and mourning at its loss? How can
you find the motivation to change your life circumstances for the better if you
won’t allow yourself to feel anger when mistreated? …

How to Improve Your Distress Tolerance Skills

As a starting point, try to accept the following 4 truths:

Negative emotions are necessary and useful. They are also
universal – everyone experiences these types of emotions

No emotion is permanent or unchanging. Emotions tend to come
and go like waves in the ocean, rising and falling in time. Sometimes it can
feel like your rage or guilt or sadness will last forever, but it won’t.

You can never hope to eliminate negative emotions and in
most cases, trying to block these emotions exacerbates your problems

Though you can’t block negative emotions, you can learn to
experience these emotions without feeling such distress and without having to
react impulsively

Three Steps to Experiencing Negative Emotions without
Distress

So the key is accepting that you can’t stop uncomfortable
emotions, and that even if you could you probably wouldn’t want to. From this
point of acceptance, you can learn to change how negative emotions affect you.

Here’s a 3 step technique that should help you become better
at riding through negative emotions without distress

Get into the habit of watching your emotions in a non judgmental
way

When emotions arise, label them for what they are

Use mental imagery to remind you of the transient nature of
emotion

Step 1 – Keeping Non Judgmental Watch of Your Emotions

Before you can change how you react to difficult emotions
you need to get into a habit and practice of paying attention to your emotions
as they change.

To do this, try to imagine yourself as a third person who is
observing neutrally. You are not involved with your emotions; you are simply
watching them from above and you are not trying to alter their course in any
way as they flow past.

Over time, as you practice this detached watching, you’ll gain
a better understanding of how your emotions come and go, build and recede in
intensity and shift and evolve into other emotions.

It’s important, in this first step, to avoid judging your feelings
as either positive or negative. You are simply a curious outsider watching a
stream of emotions flow slowly past.

Step 2 – Labeling Your Emotions

When you notice a new emotion enter your mind, try to
identify and label it.

Labeling is a practice that can help you maintain awareness
of and separation from your emotions

“This emotion is anger – I can feel it in my body too because
my heart rate is up.”

"This is sadness that I’m feeling – it is making me feel
physically tired.”

Not only does labeling help you in your practice of
mindfulness, it also helps to enhance a feeling of separation between you and
your emotions.

You label an emotion as anger and you know that though you
are feeling anger at this moment it is only a transient emotion and you do not
have to act on it or let it consume you…through this feeling of separation you
learn to interpret your emotions as informative messages rather than commands that
must be obeyed!

Step 3 – Make Use of Mental Imagery

You don’t want to resort to negative coping mechanisms, like
drinking, to deal with negative emotions.

Before you can stop using negative coping mechanisms you
need to believe that you can handle the experience of uncomfortable emotion

One way to remind yourself that negative emotions will pass
in time, that you are not your emotions and that you do not have to act upon an
emotion is through mental imagery.

Examples of Mental Imagery:

Speeding Train - If you have a difficult time dealing with
guilt from your past, try to imagine an express guilt train that passes every
now and again. When you feel guilty, imagine there’s a miles long train of
guilt thundering down the rails through your brain. You can’t stop a speeding
train and you can’t change its course, so the best thing to do is just watch it
thunder on past, taking the feelings of guilt away with it, in time

Tantrum Child - If anger’s something you struggle with,
imagine your anger is like a child having a temper tantrum. If you try to stop
it you often add fuel to the fire, so the best thing to do is just watch it
from a safe distance, until it runs its course.

Ocean Wave - You can also imagine emotion as an unstoppable
ocean wave. You can’t fight against the ocean, another wave’s always coming
along behind, but if you let the wave go and just ride it out it will
eventually crest and subside into nothingness.

Clouds in a Blue Sky – Your emotion is like a puffy cloud in
the sky moving slowly past till it’s gone.

These are just a few common examples to try, but you may
find something personal that works better for you – use your imagination!

Remember That Emotions Always Leave… But Sometimes They Come
Back!

As you get used to using mental imagery to deal with
difficult emotions you may find that though the practice helps you to ride
through feelings you used to numb with drugs or alcohol, that these negative
emotions have a tendency to come back, often quickly after leaving for the first
time.

This is normal. There’s an ebb and flow to emotions and it’s
normal to experience a comeback of negative emotion a few minutes or hours
after watching it pass by for the first time.

Simply congratulate yourself for your good attention to have
noticed this re-emergence and once again make use of mental imagery to let
things run their natural course.2

For the next 10 seconds, try not to think of a pink elephant…Impossible, right?! The fact is, the more you try to suppress an impulse to use drugs or alcohol the more fixated your mind becomes on that very impulse, and this is bad news for anyone serious about maintaining their sobriety. Fortunately, you don’t have to drink or use and you don’t have to fight or suppress your cravings, all you have to do is surf over them and they’ll disappear – using a proven mindfulness technique known as urge surfing. Read Article

Alcoholics and addicts do things in active addiction which leave them feeling guilt and shame. Learn what you can do to get over your guilt and shame to forgive yourself and let go of the past. Read Article